Recoil and Grace
by irishais
Summary: It is a little known fact that, for Quistis Trepe, grief can be worn like a well-loved coat.


**.r.e.c.o.i.l. **& _grace._

_-irishais-_

The tangle of kelp piled in a soggy heap on the shore looks like eviscerated intestines, left for the gulls and the sea monsters to pick clean. Somewhere, there is a shark offshore with a sated belly and a nose that can smell blood from a mile away. Somewhere, there is a shark that is still hungry, tearing indiscriminately through a cloud of fish.

She sits next to the pile of kelp-turned-guts and scratches at the bandage on her arm. It will leave a scar, Dr. Kadowaki promised her.

She is indifferent either way. She has got enough scars that one more isn't going to make a difference, and she isn't dead. In that perspective, the glossy outer shell of human skin that is so aggressively marketed to be unblemished, smooth and moisturized isn't as great as the beat-up, dirty shell that she brings back from every mission. The dirt, the blood, the rents in her flesh mean that she's _still alive_.

Sometimes, it means that someone else's skin didn't keep all their guts inside, and there is a thick, gelatinous mangle like kelp left behind. How many of those piles has she left since she's been back? Quistis can't remember when she stopped counting them.

Xu tells her to stop worrying so much, that Time Compression isn't going to come out of nowhere and suck her back into the clouds, where someone flicked a switch and gravity got turned around backwards. She's an Instructor again; reinstated on dedication and valor in a world-wide crisis. Shouldn't that make her happy?

Of course, Xu doesn't even know that Quistis first rejected the offer down without even thinking about it, when Cid first approached her at the celebration. She let him get his congratulations out, his pithy speeches about duty and loyalty, and how it was a "mistake" to revoke the Instructorship of such a talented teacher in the first place... failure to communicate with her students notwithstanding.

The response that was right at the tip of her tongue was proof that she had been spending entirely too much time in the company of one Irvine Kinneas; besides, that was the sort of language that she reserved for berating the cheap Garden coffee makers, and occasionally, Seifer Almasy.

"Not now," she had said instead, and he had promised her that the offer would always be open. The ex-Instructor who was part of the group of "world saviors" not being reinstated? He wouldn't take it. Cid had become deeply concerned with how the media would perceive him. Perhaps it was his personal mid-life crisis, even though Squall had taken great pains to go out and buy the same model of flashy car he'd stolen in Deling City.

Nineteen showers and a week later, she still felt the grimy tug of nonspace, and had reconsidered Cid's offer while tugging a brush through the thick mop of hair spread out around her shoulders, a tangle of dull-brass strands that frankly, weren't worth the time it took to make them behave all as one unit.

There are three small hair salons in Balamb town proper, and Quistis frequently used the one closest to the town limits. Convenience and comfort dull the sharpest minds, however, and so she took this mission across town, where a young man too similar to Zell for her tastes stood behind her and tugged out the hair clip.

"What are we doing today?" he asked, running his fingers through the mane. There was some comfort in knowing that no matter what she did today, her hair was not the first to have seen his scissors, and nor would it be the last. It was simply something that was done.

The practicality of her decision relieved her, if only a little, so Quistis exhaled, and made a gesture toward her shoulders.

Thirty minutes and a pound of hair (as good as a pound of flesh) later, Quistis emerged into the midafternoon sun, took the car back to Garden, signed it in with a surprised cadet, and stepped into the elevator.

Cid had wisely refrained from comment, and so the weight of that decision fell away; another inch (another ounce).

She had been given a class of fifteen year olds, put on the fast track to command, smart as whips. The subject was Advanced Offensive Magic. Quistis connected with them easily, much more so than she had with previous classes (Trepies excluded). They listened when she spoke, they didn't go out and have duels in the rock quarry, and they turned in their assignments on time. They were career material, she wrote on every evaluation, prime candidates for SeeD.

They were so eager for the field exam that Quistis had requested the pre-qualification exams early. They had been sent to Trabia, to eliminate herds of Mesmerizes. Trabia had become one of the worst spots for monster activity after Time Compression— SeeD was routinely dispatched on clean-up missions, and it was on one of these jaunts that Quistis sent her class.

There shouldn't have been any problems. Her cadets were brilliant, well-prepared in junctions and evasive tactics alike. They were designated Team C, and when someone started keeping a tally, they had quickly clambered to the top.

She started splitting them up into three teams, sending them out to bag Glacial Eyes, Mesmerizes, anything reasonably leveled. There was only one tactic for anything bigger than they could handle— run, and the SeeDs slated for back up would handle it.

The snow lions had slunk in, ferocious, bizarre creatures who would go after anything that moved. There hadn't been time to run, not with a pack of six, one of the largest groups that Quistis had ever seen.

The perimeter had been _clear_! (It is the only thought that she can remember having, and it haunts her.)

The flight back to Balamb was spent in silence, and she sat near the back, alone, huddled over a datapad.

There was a funeral, with closed, empty caskets, and a press conference. A meeting that Quistis can still recall every single word of with perfect clarity. She accepted with bitter grace her assessment as a sound Instructor, and given three days of bereavement leave. She hadn't fought it. She hadn't had the energy.

It is a little known fact that grief, to Quistis Trepe, can be worn like a well-loved coat, and so after the meeting had adjourned, she had rented yet another SeeD vehicle, spending the entirety of her leave visiting the families of the dead.

The worst, she recalls, was a weather beaten old fisherman, whom she had found sitting on his boat with a beer in his hand, looking like every nostalgic postcard that could be bought for a gil in the gift shop. He had looked at her with hollow eyes.

"You're the teacher, then?"

A long moment, and then Quistis nodded.

"I reckon you oughta get back to your job and try it again, before you screw up another kid."

—

The sun sets, and the searing memory with it. She sits on the beach, a scabbing wound on her arm and kelp tangled up beside her, and taps the screen of her datapad to plan the next week's lessons.

She will not screw up.

She_ can't. _


End file.
